Survival of the Fittest
Ecuador’s pride and the world’s legacy, the Galápagos grapples with growing pains.
Photography by Stuart Franklin Another morning in the Galápagos. Geared up in hats and sunglasses, slathered in SPF-30, we trudge along a North Seymour Island trail that winds through the nesting grounds of blue-footed boobies. The birds are engrossed in assorted mating rituals, lovelorn males wooing choosy females with classic overtures: drawing attention to their most manly assets (their feet), offering gifts (sticks or twigs), and intimating their promise as providers through the quality of their real estate holdings (patches of bare ground).
We watch with rapt attention. At any given point on the trail, we’re standing within inches of the birds. It’s a little unnerving, really, like voyeuring out on a TV dating show or scrutinizing the moves of college students on spring break. Stranger still, the boobies are all but oblivious to our presence. The females honk. The males whistle, strut their feet, point their bills, cock their tails….
Gawking at the unfolding drama, we break a sweat. We reach for our water bottles or grasp at biological decorum through the viewfinders of our cameras.
The desired end game of blue-footed booby courtship, we learn, is up to three chicks. Pepy Madunich, our guide, puts the scientific grid on the scene: When environmental conditions are good, three eggs, laid and hatched in succession, yield three chicks; in tougher times, the birds attend to their hatchlings by birth order, the first-born gaining all the advantages, its siblings left to get by with less food or starve to death.
Given such romantic beginnings, blue-footed boobydom seems a heartless world—that is, until we hear about the hardened life of the masked booby. The most populous of Galápagos boobies, this bird always produces two eggs but, regardless of food supply, raises only one chick; the stronger of the little darlings effectively kills its sibling by shoving it out of the nest the first chance it gets.
Lesson number one on the Galápagos: It’s all about sex. Lesson number two: It’s really all about survival of the fittest, a contest that embraces sex, self-indulgence, and fratricide.
Our party of 14, outfitted by MT Sobek for a weeklong cruise through the islands aboard the Alta, a comfortable 140-foot schooner complete with air conditioning, is itself a study in species evolution, mating habits, synergy, and turf. A couple of New Yorkers dominate the group, staging minimedia events at each turn in the trail by peppering Pepy with questions, cracking one-liners (the irresistible booby jokes), inserting themselves alongside the wildlife at every photo op, and gesticulating at predictable intervals about dire needs for nonexistent restrooms.
Curiously, their high-decibel antics establish a pecking order that serves the group rather well. The birders, a pair of introspective Washington DC-based scientists, take up the rear, dropping back in search of swallow-tailed gulls and dark-billed cuckoos. The Californians wander off ahead of the pack to ponder the cacti, scribble notes on their tablets, and talk into their camcorders. The Coloradoans, the Texan, and the Peruvian alternate places in the lineup to focus on still photography, while the two Brits, doppelgangers for Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island, seize the number two position behind the New Yorkers, where they can comment at leisure on Pepy’s enlightening narrative without actually having to voice questions about booby reproduction practices themselves.
“This is good,” Pepy says, taking stock of our respective whereabouts. “I have an idea of the group now. Always there are some photographers and some birders and some people who are interested in everything and others who want to go off by themselves.”
The Brits seize the number two position behind the New Yorkers, where they can comment at leisure on Pepy’s narrative without actually having to voice questions about booby reproduction themselves.
Pepy has led tour groups in the Galápagos for over a decade. Equal parts naturalist and den mother (picture Salma Hayek, but Ecuador-born, in cropped hair and a theoretical pith helmet), it’s her job not only to educate visitors about the islands, but also to shepherd us along, pace us relative to neighboring tour groups, and keep us from straying into restricted zones; i.e., everywhere except the marked trails.
“The Galápagos is about very small or very big things,” Pepy adds. She says this offhand. I assume she means the wildlife. All visitors to the Galápagos are subject to park rules, setting foot on the islands only under the watchful eye of guides like Pepy, naturalists licensed by Ecuador’s National Park Service who trained at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island. Station projects center on the conservation of the Galápagos’ 1,900 endemic species. Among the more successful projects to date: a 30-year effort that upped the giant tortoise population on Española Island from 13 to more than 1,000.
Which brings us to lesson number three: As an island paradise, this place—19 islands and 42 islets 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador that add up to 3,000 square miles of harsh volcanic land dotting 50,000 square miles of the Pacific—is strictly for the birds, tortoises, and other creatures. Every bit a national park and marine sanctuary, it’s the haven of innumerable unsung but distinctive plants, three species of boobies, the 13 species of Darwin’s finches, frigate birds, penguins, doves, hawks, mockingbirds, storm petrels, tropicbirds, waved albatross, flightless cormorants, brown pelicans, flamingos, the Galápagos giant tortoise, hammerhead sharks, Sally Lightfoot crabs, blue lobsters, bicolor parrot fish, Pacific green sea turtles….
Long celebrated as the remote and undeveloped archipelago that inspired Charles Darwin during his five-week voyage through the islands in 1835, the Galápagos’s identity over the next century was solidly entrenched in the British naturalist’s revolutionary theories of natural selection and evolution—and its role as living laboratory for scientists studying its unadulterated and diverse wildlife.
And then, in 1969, it opened its shores to tourism. Within the first year, it hosted 4,500 visitors. While it might seem obvious, that abundant wildlife has the run of an archipelago today supporting 17,000 human inhabitants and drawing upwards of 70,000 tourists a year is no more startling than the sheer absence of volleyball games, beach towels and umbrellas, snack bars, parasails, waterfront resorts with infinity pools, and litter.
I’ll give it this to start: There’s nothing like it. Nowhere else in my travels have I ever felt what it means to be domesticated—cordoned off on a trail by the feathered and four-legged inhabitants of an environment rife with sweeping expanses of sunbaked lava, majestic cliffs, whimsically strange vegetation, inviting beaches, primordial lagoons, and grottoes that beckon with limpid aquamarine pools.
Who would imagine “wildlife” as a group of more passive species to which we deliberately defer? Through no more than this sly role reversal, the Galápagos imparts a visceral sense of what we as a species have lost touch with in our quest for dominance and now wring our hands over: How to live in balance with other creatures on the planet.
That abundant wildlife has the run of an archipelago drawing upwards of 70,000 tourists a year is no more startling than the sheer absence of volleyball games, waterfront resorts with infinity pools, and litter.
Sunbathers here mean lava lizards and land iguanas. The only Wave Runners and surfers are sea lions. There are moments when I actually begrudge these free-ranging creatures their protected and privileged status, until I remember mine. To travel here is not so much to frolic on holiday as to undertake field study of the flora and fauna and bear witness to a balancing act between conservation efforts and economic pressures: commercial fishing, a rapidly expanding human population, and the burgeoning tourism industry itself.
Truth be told, I’m here to see the Galápagos’ marine iguanas, the planet’s only swimming lizards. I first saw these scaly black reptiles in the pages of National Geographic and made a child’s vow to one day meet them face to face. If getting around to this corner of the globe takes several decades, at least finding what you hoped to see is an easy quest once you’re here. Take, for instance, the D.C. birders’ holy grail: the waved albatross. In all the world, a dozen pairs nest on a small Ecuadorian island called La Plata; the other 12,000 pairs nest in the Galápagos on Española. Yet the birders spot their first waved albatross wheeling over Baltra, the scrappy embarkation island distinguished only by its airstrip, within 30 minutes of our landing.
Two days into the trip I meet up with the marine iguanas. They’re splayed on the beach, slithering around in tide pools, feeding on algae beneath a few feet of water that magnifies their punky bodies to Godzilla scale, and piled up on the shores of 238-square-mile Fernandina Island as if it were Ibiza. Of all my preconceptions, their smelling like moules marinière was not one of them. Nor their modest size (18 inches to 4.5 feet from nose to tail) and intermittent sneezing. A few more oddities: These prehistoric-looking vegans shrink and expand their skeletons coinciding with the availability of food, digesting their own bones when their appetites dictate. And the males develop lurid red blotches on their skin, hang out together in gangs, and stage rumbles during breeding season, losing the macho behavior and chick-magnet coloration soon after they mate.
Nowhere else have I ever felt what it means to be domesticated—cordoned off by the feathered and four-legged inhabitants of an environment rife with inviting beaches and primordial lagoons.
“Marine iguanas survive on green algae and seawater,” Pepy tells us, “desalinating the water with glands above their eyes and sneezing out the salt through their nostrils….” Picking our way across lava rock at Fernandina’s Punta Espinosa, we note that marine iguanas also spew this whitish exudate to warn us interlopers (initially the two New Yorkers but eventually all of us) when we’re within a few feet of invading their space. This, too, comes as a surprise: Galápagos wildlife is at best indifferent to our presence but more often wary, behavior that seems at once sensible and sobering.
An estimated 250,000 marine iguanas thrive in the Galápagos, though they’ve seen better days. Within a year of the Jessica oil tanker spill, Santa Fé Island (nine square miles located just eight miles from Fernandina but on the far side of the archipelago) lost 60 percent of its 25,000-strong marine iguana population, its windward shore contaminated by a quart of oil per yard of beach. To complicate the picture, the oil was earmarked for use by, among others, area residents, tour boats, and Charles Darwin Research Station generators.
The hammerhead shark population and a hapless species of sea cucumber have also found themselves at the mercy of humankind. Both are falling prey in increasing numbers to fishing boats catering to lucrative Asian markets that tout shark-fin soup and powdered sea cucumber as aphrodisiacs. Beyond the issue of overfishing, there are some Galápagos residents who, licensed for sustainable or “artisan” fishing within protected waters, abet poaching by commercial vessels to subsidize meager incomes. Add to that Ecuador’s economic downturn at the turn of the millennium that drove mainlanders to seek employment in Galápagos fishing or tourism in the first place.
And who can fault them.
Dropping in on the archipelago’s main settlement and Pepy’s home base, I learn that fast-growing Puerto Ayora is a friendly town of 16,000, where fathers tote inflatable plastic rafts to swimming holes and mothers ride to ice-cream shops on bicycles. Children account for nearly 70 percent of Puerto Ayora’s population.
It’s a lot to ponder during our week on the Alta, our days of following sea turtles in mangrove swamps, floating above flotillas of spotted eagle rays, searching out centenarian tortoises, tracking fat yellow land iguanas with flame-red tongues, treading carefully along beaches to give wide berth to baby sea turtles, musing about the global promise of Viagra over shipboard dinners, and joining in zesty evening singalongs of “New York, New York” and “America the Beautiful,” along with games of charades and hangman.
During a late afternoon stroll on Española Island, I find myself wondering whether the best hope for the Galápagos inadvertently rests with its sea lions. Of all the wildlife, it’s these exuberant marine mammals that consistently initiate playful contact with us humans, that follow us when we kayak and swim circles around us when we snorkel. It’s this sea lion welcome wagon that even bonds us all as a group, right down to the stiff-upper-lip Brits.
The sand is soft and sticky; the ocean, the peculiar blue of a motel swimming pool. The setting is apocalyptically idyllic: No boats in the bay, no planes in the sky. Just us and them.
Sea lions aren’t endemic to the islands, but they’re perpetual crowd-pleasers, well-adapted—in fact, flourishing from the decimation of their main predator, the beleaguered hammerhead shark—and highly social creatures that contribute considerably to the popularity of tourism. At the very least, the latter keeps the future of the Galápagos in the international spotlight.
On Española’s Gardner Bay, 200 or so sea lions loll on the beach, the lone alpha male bellowing offshore while a trio of pups rolls around in the surf. The sand is soft and sticky; the ocean, the peculiar blue of a motel swimming pool. The setting is apocalyptically idyllic: No boats in the bay, no planes in the sky. Just us and them. I’m watching the moon rise when the smallest wave lands one of the sea lion pups right at my feet. It looks me shyly in the eye for what feels like forever and it’s gone in an instant. •
Virtuoso Life
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
